Too Much Tequila, Too Little Sunscreen

“Get my rifle Josefina; here it comes again,” I yell without taking my eyes from my binoculars. “I’ll get that son of a bitch this time.”

“Get it yourself; you’re not going to hit it anyway.”

“Ah come on, if I take my eyes off of it, I’ll lose it.”

“Go ahead and lose it. It’s going to fly right on over us no matter what you do.”

“I know but I’ve gotta try. I can’t let Big Brother get away with this any longer.”

So goes the dialog almost daily between Josefina and me. I’m adamant about shooting down this damn government spy plane and after a few thousand rounds Josefina has given up on my ability to hit anything. She should have seen me in the Corps. I could geld a mouse at 500 yards with my M16 ― well maybe 300 yards. If the VC could shoot down our helicopters in Nam with small arms fire, then I can take this damn thing down with my hunting rifle.

“Come on; let me get off one round at least.”

“Okay, but lets sit down and discuss this as soon as you’ve wasted all of your ammo. We need a better plan.”

Finally I fire off 68 rounds, but as usual that damn thing just keeps coming. I resign myself to another victory by Big Brother, put down my rifle and enter 0946 Jan. 4, 2011 into my log. I keep accurate records of the flyovers so that I can develop a pattern for when I have the proper firepower.

“Come on in for breakfast. I’ll wake Boner.”

Breakfast is her usual weak, overly sweet coffee, runny eggs, chili devoid of all flavor except extreme heat and stiff burnt tortillas. Josefina may be the worst cook in the world but no one has the courage to tell her so. She just keeps cooking and cooking and we keep looking for new and better ways to secretly dispose of her creations. Boner comes out of the guest bedroom grinning followed by César, our pet goat and Boner’s best friend.

“Mornin’ Boner.”

“Asubuhi njema.”

Boner seems to understand English but he only speaks some foreign tongue we think is Swahili. You see, Boner fried his brain with drugs years ago and froze a couple of his personal traits in time. It’s like his brain is stuck at exactly what he was doing at that instant in time the frying occurred. He only speaks Swahili, he grins continuously and he has this embarrassing but enviable condition. He has a perpetual erection. He must have been happily humping some Tanzanian babe when his brain snapped. If one must get stuck in one brief instant in time, his ain’t a bad way to go. He is really large and his protruding erection either scares the hell out of you or you admire it as a true thing of beauty, depending on your interests at the moment. Me, I’m just jealous.

As best we can tell, his penis is erect 24/7 and it protrudes at a near 90 degree angle causing this huge bulge in the front of whatever he’s wearing. He seems to favor sweat pants because they are less constraining but they just add to his “protruding” problem; that’s if you call it a problem. We’ve tried everything we can think of to help him get it down: cold water, drugs, ice packs, booze, whacking it with stick but nothing worked. When Josefina was younger she was very good at turning my rigid erections into limp, dangling softies. Once she tried all of her old tricks on Boner but nothing worked. Boner just broadened his smile and moaned Mimi kuja, Mimi kuja, Mimi kuja over and over. Josefina reported back that although Boner’s boner looks good it doesn’t really work for him; it just stands there like a flag pole but nothing else. He never finishes, so to speak. She added, with a sigh, that it did work wonders for her, however.

For the past couple of years she’s been researching and experimenting with herbal and homeopathic remedies to help Boner with his problem. She has this theory that if aphrodisiacs create erections then one must concoct exactly the opposite ingredients for the inverse effect. She once made a brew with a rhino’s tail thinking that it would have the opposite effect as a rhino’s horn, a well-known aphrodisiac. In any case, she checks Boner’s boner every evening, sometimes for extended periods of time.
Boner has been with us … let’s see now … since 1996 … that’s 14 years now. We woke up one morning at the Burning Man annual bonfire up in the Nevada desert and found Boner in our tent, with a boner, curled around César fast asleep. He and César have been inseparable ever since.

Boner digs into his eggs and chili while I move mine around on my plate. “We’ve got to have a better plan,” Josefina says between bites, “We’ve been shooting at that spy plane for months now. I think it must be too high to hit with a rifle. We need a hand-held surface-to-air missile launcher like the Ukrainian 336-24. I’ve read that it out performs the U.S.-designed Stinger and the Soviet-Russian Igla-1. What well-heeled terrorist do we know that could lay his hands on one for us?”

“I suppose one of the Mexican drug cartels could get us one but I don’t know how we’d pay for it,” I say hesitantly.

Boner chimes in with, “Takatifu shit.”

I know a little bit about the drug business; in fact I was pushing drugs when Josefina and I met. I was discharged after my second tour in Viet Nam and used my GI Bill to attend classes at Arizona State in Tempe, Arizona. It was really boring sitting in classes with teenagers after spending so many months in the boonies kicking ass and taking names. Although ASU is relatively close to the Mexican border, drugs were expensive, especially after Nam pricing, and hard to come by. Go figure. I knew I could run a drug business on campus, make a few bucks and have more fun than sitting in the student union with some pimple-faced jackass discussing Freud’s theory of transference in the therapeutic relationship.

Anyway, my drug business took off much faster and bigger than I ever imagined. All of a sudden I was the “Big Man on Campus” and I was rolling in dough. I was socking away piles of money and rapidly losing interest in my studies when I met Assistant Professor Josefina Bernstein, PhD teaching her obscure class on the introduction to Sociocultural Anthropology, whatever in hell that is. We hit it off right away. She became my biggest customer and I ended up with an A+ in her class. I leave it to you to figure out how I actually earned that A+.

Life was good. Uncle Sam was picking up my tuition. I was making money faster than a junk bond trader. I was sleeping with this sexy older woman and I was staying higher than the water line on the Titanic. Josefina was into causes and her cause du jour was César Chávez and his United Farm Workers organization. I was all for the rights of migrant farm workers but I didn’t share her passion for these poor people. Maybe Nam had driven my give-a-shit factor way down on my humanity scale.

The Arizona legislature had just passed a bill prohibiting farm workers from boycotting and striking during harvest times and César Chávez wasn’t going to take that with a full stomach so he went on a very public fast and we all went to a big rally in support of his fasting. Maybe it was the mood of the crowd, maybe it was the weather or it could have been the drugs, but we thought the best way to get our point across would be to do it in the nude. The crowd cheered us on and for a while we thought we were really making a statement for the rights of farm workers everywhere. That was just before the police came and convinced us otherwise. We were both arrested and photographed by the police and the press au naturel. The following morning I saw my sorry ass and Josefina’s magnificent tits on the front page of the The Arizona Republic. Unfortunately, we weren’t the only ones who saw it. Josefina was notified by her department head that her services would no longer be required after the end of that term. That was okay by me, I was pretty sick of college by then but Josefina was devastated. She had worked years for her shot at tenure and it all went down the drain in one braless afternoon.

We finished out the term and both said goodbye to the hallowed halls of academia, Josefina with a tear and me with a finger. We really didn’t have anything else to do or anywhere else to go. Josefina only knew teaching and Sociocultural Anthropology, whatever that is, and the only three things I was good at were: throwing hand grenades, disabling land mines and peddling dope to teenagers.

Somewhere in our drug-induced haze we heard that César Chávez was setting up a “wet line” along the US/Mexico border to keep more Mexicans from entering the U.S. illegally and screwing up his unionization efforts. We volunteered and were immediately sent to the loneliest stretch of desert either of us had ever seen, along the border in Luna County, New Mexico. Turning around wetbacks wasn’t nearly as much fun as we thought it would be. They really wanted to come here and they could care less about César Chávez or his unionization efforts. We hated the job but fell in love with the country. We bought an old run-down ranch right along our “wet line” spot with the intentions of fixing it up. Someday I’ve got to get on with whatever “fixing it up” means.

I had just fallen asleep with John Arthur’s Once upon a Time in a Psychotic Daze on my chest when Josefina woke me as she crawled into bed. She was worn out from having spent the evening checking on Boner’s boner. I looked at the clock; it was 3:34 AM. Boner was still moaning his Mimi kuja, Mimi kuja, Mimi kuja from the other room when someone started pounding loudly on our front door.